Automatic link generation
Ross G. Wilkinson, Alan F. Smeaton · ACM Computing Surveys · 1999
In order to access any kind of stored information, one may store it at a specific location, and in the case of electronic information this could be a file name or a Web address.If the location is not known or the amount of information to be accessed is greater than the number of locations that can be remembered, then it is necessary to find the information based on its attributes, its content, or its relationships to other pieces of information whose location is known.In the first two cases, we search, as in information retrieval, while in the latter we navigate, as in hypertext and thus these two areas of hypertext and information retrieval are tightly related [Agosti 1996].Hypertextual navigation from known locations has some advantages over search.Two of these key advantages are that content creators can provide carefully-defined specific relationships, and that users of the information have a context in which to understand information.However these advantages can be difficult to realise as the size of the information space grows.Some of the problems are:• The size of the collection may be simply too large to allow for human assigned relationships -a collection of 24,900 articles is difficult to manually cross-reference.• The collection is sufficiently dynamic that human maintenance costs are too high [Thistlewaite 1997] .• If the information space is larger than can be authored by a single person, there can be problems with consistency associated with the information space.Ellis et al. noted significant differences in the links manually assigned by different people for the same documents [Ellis 1994].